Welcome to the jOOQ Tuesdays series. In this series, we’ll publish an article on the third Tuesday every other month where we interview someone we find exciting in our industry from a jOOQ perspective. This includes people who work with SQL, Java, Open Source, and a variety of other related topics.
![rgurma[1]](https://i0.wp.com/blog.jooq.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/rgurma1.jpg?ssl=1)
We have the pleasure of talking to Raoul-Gabriel Urma in this second edition who will be telling us a little about what Java 8 and English have in common.
Hi Raoul – You’re about to publish a very interesting PhD regarding programming language evolution. What is it about?
Natural languages such as English and Spanish have evolved over the years. However, in general the evolution take centuries. Consequently, society has had time to adapt.
Programming languages share a similar characteristic: they evolve. However, unlike natural languages, they evolve almost every year! This puts greater pressure on developers and existing code bases. For example, new features are introduced, idioms changes and sometime different language versions are backward incompatible.
As part of my dissertation I argue that developers need machine support focused on locating sources of backward incompatibilities and contribute various techniques for both static and dynamically typed languages.
I’m also co-organising a workshop on the topic as part of ECOOP if that’s of interest! http://2015.ecoop.org/track/PLE-2015-papers
Very interesting! Programming languages seem to be a favourite topic of yours. You’ve written an impressive book with great reviews on Amazon (4.7 out of 5!). What do you readers learn from it?
I’ve written a book called Java 8 in Action together with Mario Fusco and Alan Mycroft. We wanted to write a book which teaches how to benefit from the various new Java 8 features. However, we also wanted to write a book that the Java community will still be reading in five or ten years. This is why the book covers many topics on top of lambda expressions and the Streams API such as testing & debugging, refactoring, enhanced concurrency, functional programming concepts and even a bit of Scala!
And what was your biggest learning from writing the book?
It always takes more time than you think ;-)
Being (blog) writers ourselves, we can certainly relate to that!
Java 8 with lambdas and streams is inevitable for all of us. From your earlier work experience at Google, Oracle, Ebay, Goldman Sachs, what do you expect will be the biggest challenges for adopters in the industry when upgrading to Java 8 and functional programming?
Java 8 makes Java sexy again. Unfortunately, a big part of software engineering is to deal with legacy frameworks and codebases, which may impede the adoption of Java 8 for various companies. Nonetheless, several recent surveys show that Java 8’s adoption is going strong.
From the various conference talks, discussions and training courses I’ve given so far, it is clear that the Java community is excited about using lambdas and the Streams API. Hopefully this means that more people will embrace the functional-style in the next 5 years :-).
At Data Geekery with jOOQ, we’ve been working to integrate SQL – a very powerful external domain-specific language – into Java, (ab)using the Java language to the extreme. From a Java / Java 8 perspective, what is your take on domain-specific languages in general, and on SQL in particular?
I think jOOQ is a fantastic project! I’m a believer of writing code that matches the business problem’s domain. It helps readabiliy and maintenance, and ultimately it’s useful for productivity.
You’ve also been busy co-founding startups next to writing books and PhDs. What is it that you love about your various jobs?
I love contributing to people’s lives and knowledge!
<PLUG>
If you are interested in Java 8 training, check out the course I’ve put together with Richard Warbuton and James Gough: http://java8training.com
</PLUG>